Wednesday, July 26, 2017

The effective Change Management effort should help to cultivate the culture of innovation and encourage the risk-taking attitude.The digital organization starts with a changing nature. Uncertainty, ambiguity, unpredictability, velocity etc., are the digital new normal. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. The digital business dynamic allows the organization to morph as the business conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit. But change is never for its own sake, one of the good reasons for the change is to keep the organization fit, and a fitting business has better changeability and higher business maturity as well.

Change Management in top management: At the enterprise level, successful changes are often linked to the DNA of the organization itself, the spirit of change starts from the top. It requires the top management to support Change Management. But more importantly, it requires Change Management in top management itself. Sometimes, their management disciplines and practices through the process itself become a barrier for Change Management, because the transformative changes need to deprogram old mindsets, let go of the “voices from the past,” reprogramming the collective minds with new perspectives, norms, and attitudes. It is like to recode the DNA of the business, challenging, but establishing a new blueprint for how top management should create the digital future reality. It's the tough call to communicate and bring change management to the top. The sponsorship and involvement from the top are critical for Change Management success, especially for strategic change in the long run. Because the goal of change and improvement should look beyond immediate problem resolution. The focus should include actions designed to sustain performance improvement and anchor change as a new opportunity. It's about getting into actions in creative, positive, productive ways that educate, support and celebrate every emotional step of the change curve and collective transformation journey.

Strike the right balance between orders (standardization) and ‘chaos’ (change): Change is the new normal, and the speed of change is increasing, major changes in an organization’s ecosystem can have unforeseen consequences that negatively impact the company’s productivity and performance. Thus, Change Management shouldn’t be just a couple of random business initiatives, it has to be embedded into the multitude of digital management processes and become an ongoing business capability, to improve organizational effectiveness, responsiveness, flexibility, and maturity. Digital transformation is all about balancing all major business elements impacting change: People, process, procedures and IT. Digital organizations especially have to be more nimble about updating technology due to continuous business disruptions. And you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by managing them in a holistic way. Business frictions often stifle innovation and decrease organizational efficiency and productivity. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the environment. They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. Workforce and workplace changes are a top priority in strategic planning initiatives in all companies: it can be difficult to find the right allocation of resources and talent to the implementation of the plan while simultaneously monitoring feedback, managing risks, and meeting obligations to staff and customers. The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic business competency and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, to adapt to rapid changes frictionlessly.

Running a real-time digital organization means high-responsiveness with speed: With today’s “VUCA” new normal, to survive the fierce competitions and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve more planning, adjustment, and speed. Digital means the accelerating speed. Due to the high frequency of changes and digital disruptions, organizational change management has a strong role in business transformation, benefits realization, and strategy execution. The goal to run a real-time digital organization is to create synergy and achieve digital synchronization of the entire organization. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into the collective communication, mentality, process, and action of the organization. It is important to understand what really matters and then put real horsepower behind these things, set the right priority to achieve well-defining goals. It is also important to leverage tools (systems/solutions) for Change Management, which are capable of increasing speed and consistency.

The effective Change Management effort should help to cultivate the culture of innovation and encourage the risk-taking attitude. It goes head-in-head with strategy management, to encourage people getting out of their comfort zone, reward innovative way to solve the old problems, build the differentiated business competency, and improve both individuals and overall organizational “Changeability.”